Ipad: On the Plane and In the Boardroom

I got my iPad, the 3G model, as soon as they came out the last of April.  I have been using at home mostly, and thus have not used the 3G capability until this weekend.  At home, I use it to read the Wall St. Journal in the morning, and visit the website of my local newspaper to read the local news.  I have both the iBook and Kindle Reader for iPad applications, and have books in both apps.  The reading experience is much better than the Kindle, and the WSJ app is fantastic.

This weekend, I attended the June AANA Board meeting, and I thought it would offer me a good opportunity to see if I could get along with just the iPad and leave my laptop (a MacBook Air) at home.  As Board members, we download Word® and Acrobat® documents from a private portion of the AANA website- agendas, background info, the budget, etc.  I purchased a one-month, 250 mb 3G subscription for $15, and set off from Spokane to Chicago.

The iPad was great for on the plane- I could read my books, and listen to music at the same time.  I also have a number of favorite music DVDs that I have "ripped" - turning them into files that I can then upload to the iPad via iTunes.   So when we had a white-knuckle descent through a fierce thunderstorm into the Minneapolis airport (the next day I found out the storm spawned 30 tornadoes and killed 3 people!), I put on the headphones and focused on my Carlos Santana "Live By Request" video.  It helped.

Back to the Board meeting.  To download and read the various documents, I bought an app called GoodReader for iPad.  It allows you to download, store, and read Word and Acrobat files.  I then proceeded to the AANA website, logged in, and used GoodReader to download the various documents for the meeting.

I found the downloading process awkward - it took a lot of going back and forth from the GoodReader app to the Safari web browser app to get them all down.  But I finally downloaded them all, and then would switch back and forth during the meeting.  The problem is that, unlike a laptop, you can't have more than one app open at any one time, and also you can only have only one document open at a time.

So, for the Saturday meeting, I went back to using my laptop.  However, I still will use my iPad as an e-book and e-zine reader, web browser, and video and music player.  It has a place, and if I didn't have a laptop I might get a bluetooth keyboard and use it for these business meetings, but for now it will stay up in my room for use in reading at night and in the morning but not at meetings.